The World From Islam

By George Negus

The phenomenal bestseller on Islam from one of Australia's most trusted journalists and popular personalities.
What is Islam? What is it that Muslims believe, and why? Why do they fight not just wars but jihads - holy wars? How great are the belief chasms between Muslims, Jews and Christians? George Negus has travelled extensively throughout the Middle East and Asia, from his days on Foreign Correspondent to the present, and has recently returned from the Middle East after researching both post-September 11 and post-Bali problems, and the Iraqi issues surrounding the Iraq war. In this book George dispels the myths and explores the mutual ignorance, beliefs, differences and philosophies concerning these religions, while explaining the entirely different way of life that is Islam. through his personal and professional contacts and experience with the Islamic world, he examines the issues that have set Islamic and non-Islamic worlds against each other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jan 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780730491569

George Negus

George Negus is one of Australian television’s most respected journalists. He is the author of ACROSS THE RED UNKNOWN, BY GEORGE!, and the bestselling THE WORLD FROM ITALY and THE WORLD FROM ISLAM. George and his partner, Kirsty, and their two children live in Balmain, Sydney.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

SO WHAT’S ALL THE FUSS?

An invasion of Iraq is an invasion of the entire Arab-Muslim world.

Egyptian government official,

ABC Radio’s AM program,

26 March 2003

An Invasion of Iraq or an Invasion of Islam?

On Thursday, 20 March 2003, US Tomahawk cruise missiles in their hundreds—the so-called ‘even smarter bombs’—began raining down on strategic targets in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, home to five million people. But none of the missiles was smart enough to let anyone in the West know whether the ultimate target, the current ‘evil man of history’, Saddam Hussein, was dead or alive. As that historically high-tech bombardment of Baghdad and the Iraqis dragged on inconclusively, the prescient words of an Arab-Muslim friend, spoken a couple of months earlier in Dubai, rang in my mind.

‘If you in the West want to get rid of Saddam, just ask and we will help you,’ he said in that sardonic Gulf manner I’d become used to over years of contact with Arab-Muslims. ‘But don’t expect us to get involved in a military invasion that could mean killing God knows how many Iraqis—Iraqis who also want to see the end of him, including many in uniform.’ My friend’s proviso was distinctly Gulf, distinctly Arab, distinctly conditional.

Then he added the ultimate in distinctly Arab-Muslim taglines, the ubiquitous insh’allah. God willing.

Muslims, you may or may not have realised, believe that everyone’s fate, indeed their whole life, is ultimately in the hands of God, or Allah. Muslims live by a sophisticated religious version of ‘que sera, sera’—whatever will be, will be. They would never tell you that their lot or yours was written in the cards or will be revealed by the stars. Nor do they adhere to any of the silly forms of predestination. They believe, very simply, that Allah is the ultimate arbiter of their existence—for better or worse. If you don’t understand this utterly God-dependent essence of being a Muslim—whether a good Muslim like my Dubai friend or a bad pseudo-Muslim like Saddam or Osama bin Laden—you don’t and will never understand Muslims. Islam is not their religion, it is their life.

But whether it was Allah speaking through him or his own intelligent idea, my Dubai friend went on: ‘There has always been another way, one that might prevent the slaughter of both soldiers and civilians. They’re not just Iraqis, you know, they’re Muslims.’

‘Are you suggesting that force is not the only way, but that George W. Bush wants to use force?’ I asked.

‘He’ll have to ask his God about that, but there’s an approach to the whole Iraqi problem that no one has thought about. Has anyone suggested taking a plane-load of world leaders—Bush, Blair, Schroeder, Chirac, Putin, the Chinese, your prime minister, led by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to Baghdad? Tell the Iraqis they’re coming, no tricks, no surprises. No army fighter jets, no CIA. No media. Send an official UN message to Saddam saying, We’re arriving at Baghdad International Airport at such and such a time on such and such a day and we want to meet Saddam. We want to talk with him. Has anyone even suggested it? Anyone? No, they haven’t. Why not?’

‘Good question,’ I replied. ‘But what happens when they actually get to Baghdad?’

‘If they turned up en masse, what’s he going to do? Shoot them out of the sky as soon as they enter Iraqi air space? Arrest them when they arrive at the terminal? Of course he isn’t!’

‘So what would happen when they arrived?’ I asked, not entirely facetiously.

‘They could take a fleet of taxis—that in itself would be a new experience for many of them—and head off to Saddam’s palace compound across the Tigris. If they were to turn up at the main gate and demand to see him, would the Iraqis refuse? I doubt it. After a bit of carry-on, they would eventually get to see him and tell him, We are here to discuss this mess we’re all in, what we’re going to do to avoid war. We want to negotiate. What’s Saddam going to do—refuse to talk? No way! How could he with the eyes and ears of the world waiting for his reaction?’

The gist of my friend’s ostensibly outlandish idea was that Saddam would either talk sensibly to the visiting world leaders about weapons of mass destruction, about any Iraqi links with Al Qa’ida or other terrorist groups, about human rights in Iraq, about democracy, about the Kurds, about a peaceful way out of the impasse—or he would leave the rest of the Muslim world, together with the non-Muslim world, as a sort of Coalition of the More and More Willing, with no option but to use force.

But apparently negotiation was out of the question. And we’ll never know if it might have made a difference, if one of the most inhumane periods in recent world history might have been avoided.

Since then, it’s become diplomatically and politically acceptable for the West to talk with those other members of the so-called Axis of Evil, the North Koreans, who claim to have nuclear weapons and are prepared to use them, and to self-styled guerillas and thugs in the anarchic Solomon Islands—but not with the likes of Saddam. Curious, at least. At worst, a double standard.

Despite the impression left by Islamic extremists, the overwhelming majority of the world’s one-and-a-quarter billion Muslims have never held any brief for Saddam Hussein and his despicable regime. Nor do they support the tactics of Osama bin Laden, or even Palestinian suicide bombers whose cause, not methods, they generally do support. Yet most moderate Muslims have come, rightly or wrongly, to regard the war against the Iraqi dictator and terrorism as virtually and ultimately a war against Muslims and Islam, across the ethnic board. And in that sort of complex, confusing and passionate state of affairs, perceptions count.

Hence the worrying quote at the beginning of this Prologue: ‘An invasion of Iraq is an invasion of the entire Arab-Muslim world.’ That said, there was never going to be a general Muslim response to the beleaguered Iraqis’ call to ‘turn every country in the world into a battlefield’. Extremist Islamic minorities, yes. Extremist Islamic majorities, no!

And it’s Not About Religion?

With the US battalions storming their way towards Baghdad for eleven tumultuous days, ABC Australia correspondent Geoff Thompson interviewed a couple of young American marines, gunners preparing to rain steel down on entrenched Iraqis in central Iraq. The pair told him how they could fire 88 grenades in one dump on the enemy—precision killing from 30 kilometres, as Thompson described it. ‘They drop down and some of them will bounce up and they’ll get you chest high,’ Sgt Jorge Velasque told him matter-of-factly.

‘What do you imagine is happening at the other end of this artillery battery?’ Thompson asked the young marine.

‘I imagine there’s a lot of people out there prayin’,’ was Velasque’s ingenuous reply.

As Thompson was conducting his interview, as sensitively as possible under the circumstances, a military chaplain was leading an improvised church service in the middle of the Iraqi desert. American troops were singing that old Protestant favourite, ‘The Old Rugged Cross’. Thompson noted that this bizarre display of prayer and Christian religiosity was taking place in the midst of news that four US marines had just been killed in a suicide car bombing at a nearby checkpoint.

Within hours of going to church, Thompson noted, Lt Col. Charles Robinson was receiving orders to kill people he has never met and whose bodies he will probably never see. So how did he cope, knowing that what he was doing was killing unseen, unidentifiable Iraqis. The young officer’s reply was riveting: he asked his Christian God to both protect him and guide his missiles to the ‘right’ targets. ‘Well, you have to definitely know that you’re doing the right thing out here—and pray a lot. You have to get that peace from God that you’re doing the right thing. You go to church and worship and then you’re killing somebody. You know, it’s something that causes big conflict.’

Lt Col. Robinson said it was difficult because, ‘You know, usually you think about going to church in your nice clothes on Sunday morning at home and going back and eating dinner with the family. But out here, you go to church and three hours later you’re sending rounds down, raining shit on people.’ Robinson said there was not much emotional conflict for him, ‘because, like I said, I think I’m doing the right thing out here’.

A matter of minutes later another reporting colleague, Peter Cave, ABC Radio’s international editor, filed a report from Israel documenting the latest bloody Palestinian suicide attack against Jews in the coastal city of Netanya. Cave reported that Hamas, the militant Palestinian terrorist group, had made available to the media a videotape of the twenty-year-old bomber in which he was shown praying and kissing the Islamic holy text, the Qur’an, before going off to blow himself and his young Israeli victims to smithereens. He killed himself, Cave was told, ‘as a gift to the people of Iraq and to mark Land Day, an annual protest at what the Palestinians call the theft of Arab land by the State of Israel’.

Ask yourself: when their time is up, will the young American marines, Valesque and Robinson, their invisible flesh-and-blood Iraqi targets, the pathetic Palestinian suicide bomber ‘gifting’ his life, and the innocent, uninvolved Israelis all find themselves in Heaven? Will they be together in the same Heaven—or will they be in several different ones? Will they be greeted in the Hereafter by the Christians’ God, by Allah or by both? Nasty questions for monotheistic believers, be they Christians, Muslims or Jews, to answer—if, that is, they are brave enough to try! You could say that faith of whatever kind is handy to have while you’re alive, to prop you up when you think you might die. But once you’re dead and gone to Wherever, what price faith? And what if you picked the wrong faith? You certainly don’t get a second chance.

And it’s not about religion…? Don’t let anyone tell you that this all-embracing human predicament, this gulf between the Muslim and Judaeo-Christian worlds brought to a head by the so-called war against terror, is not about just that. As we keep being told, we are not involved in a war between religions. But it is a war about religion, about personal attitudes, about life values. It might not be, as Samuel Huntington rashly called it in 1993, ‘A clash of civilisations’. But it’s definitely a clash of ideologies, a clash of value systems, a clash of cultures. And you don’t get much more fundamental than that.

In the end, the Great Divide is about what people—Christians, Jews, Muslims, whatever—believe themselves to be. That makes it about ideologies, about purpose, about what people have come to think being a human being means. As my wise Emirati Muslim friend counselled me: ‘We cannot and we should not take religion out of it. Only when we take the time to understand each other’s religion will we begin to understand each other.’

There’s a highly relevant book by an American writer, Benjamin R. Barber, shrewdly entitled Jihad vs McWorld. As Barber puts it, the most damaging conflict underlying our times is consumerist capitalism versus religion and tribal fundamentalism. ‘These diametrically opposed but intertwined forces are tearing apart—and bringing together—the world as we know it.’ If Barber is even half right, getting to know Muslims, their religion and their tribal fundamentalism might not be such a bad idea.

Real Ease and Proper Peace

September 11 is now more than two years behind us; the war against Iraq is apparently over; Saddam Hussein’s hated regime may or may not have changed; unlocated weapons of mass destruction apparently still exist; Iraqis and Americans continue to take each other out in the name of cultural sovereignty and democracy; terrorist killers continue to stalk the earth in the name of Allah; the religious slaughter of innocents at Bali’s Kuta Beach is embedded in our national psyche; the Middle East remains the tinder-box it’s been for decades and the conflict between Jewish Israelis and Muslim Palestinians persists as the ultimate explanation for global tension and a new problem has emerged—a barrier of shortsighted self-interest to fence in the Palestinian Muslims in the Occupied Territories that will undoubtedly fuel their hatred, frustration and maniac retribution against Israeli Jews. In other words, the war on terror and the war on the war on terror rage on!

But in the war that really matters, the one against the root cause of all of this—the abysmal mutual ignorance between the world’s billion-plus Muslims and the rest of us in the non-Muslim world—hardly a shot, friendly or otherwise, has been fired.

In this long-time observer’s view, only when both sides are actively engaged in this sort of war, a necessary and desirable war, will the world begin to be at real ease and enjoy proper peace. Our mutual ignorance is gargantuan, it is inexcusable—but it is remediable. This next war should be a verbal war, an unholy war, an anti-jihad between people on the two sides of the world’s religious divide.

As things stand, religion, no matter whose religion it is—Christian, Jew, Muslim or Calathumpian—has a lot to answer for. It’s time we stopped pulling our punches with religion and recognised that it’s caused at least as much strife and human suffering as it’s prevented.

Over the last two decades and more, as a journalist I’ve worked and travelled in more than a dozen Islamic countries. My contacts and associates in the Arab-Muslim world in particular are a virtual human kaleidoscope of Islam—from camel-herders in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, Bedouin in the deserts of Wadi Rum in southern Jordan and former slaves from Timbuktu to Gulf oil sheikhs, religious mullahs in Iran, Saddam-serving Iraqi fighters, Islamic scholars, senior Arab politicians, diplomats, sportscar-driving Muslim zealots in Dubai and even Yasser Arafat. On the basis of this regular and varied contact, I would argue that more than 99.99 per cent of Muslims are not, repeat not, terrorists.

The vast majority of Muslims, committed moderates, do not spend their days plotting how to fly planes into New York skyscrapers or bring the United States to its knees. Like the rest of us, they are stumbling forward trying to find a way through life. But even moderate Muslims bear a bitter resentment, often spilling over into studied (as distinct from violent) hatred towards what they regard as the arrogance and cultural imperialism of the West, the United States in particular. If we ignore this antipathy and its reasons, moderate Muslims will never be able to join us in ridding the world of Islamic extremism—and with it the militaristic extremism it provokes in so-called God-fearing Westerners, including their leaders. Have you ever heard the leaders of the Coalition of the Willing ask what actually drives the minuscule minority of Islamic terrorists to do what they do? Sorry, simplistically calling up the tired old ‘good versus evil’ line just doesn’t work! There are good and evil believers on both sides. Information and understanding we need, not blind prejudice and claims to a one true faith. Smart thinking will eventually stop more terrorists than smart bombs will.

As is the case in the Western and non-Muslim worlds, there are Arab-Muslim governments that are incompetent, undemocratic, corrupt, duplicitous; some are violent and dangerous. But we in the West might get further by attempting at least to talk them around, not by berating and haranguing them jingoistically about how superior our Western non-Muslim values are. Bombing them into some sort of questionable pseudo-democratic regime change will not remove their inherent flaws, injustices or their resentment. Coming to grips with our intrinsic cultural, historical and religious differences remains the only plausible approach to removing the mutual human ignorance between us. Until we do this, the ‘eye-for-an-eye’ killing, the distrust and the tension will continue. The so-called ‘Roadmap to Peace’ in the Middle East is merely the beginning of a much wider and deeper journey, not the end.

After returning from a refresher trip to the Gulf, reconvinced that really understanding and accepting Islam was the absolute prerequisite to dealing with Muslims, let alone democratising them, the author came across the following exchange in the Australian Financial Review (10-11 May 2003) between two longstanding friends, journalist Lyndal Crisp and Sydney-based historian, writer and Catholic priest, Edmund Campion. Just a little leadingly, Lyndal asked Ed if he thought that religion was dying.

Ed replied, ‘That’s obvious. Religion is shrinking. Many of us haven’t really taken this into account. In many ways we’re whistling in the wind. On the other hand, an objective observer would have to point to the enormous growing strength of Islam. If the nineteenth century was the century of the British Empire and the twentieth century was the American century, then it’s a fair bet the twenty-first century will be the century of Islam. It’s a religion with enormous wells of compassion in it—despite the bad press it gets in this country.’

PART ONE

ABDALLAH’S CRASH COURSE IN ISLAM

‘From Riyadh to the UN headquarters in New York and Jakarta, there is a growing awareness that militant Islamism is the enemy of established societies—Western and Muslim alike. By widening the battlefront, militant Islamists may have unintentionally created a united front opposed to them.’

Gerard Henderson

The Five Pillars of Islam—and Beyond

Mosques can be overpoweringly imposing and beautiful things. They can be warm. They can be purely functional. They can be big. They can be small. They can be right in your face or tucked away almost shyly, somewhere insignificant. They can be ornate and architecturally spectacular. They can be design-specific or extremely rudimentary. They can be elaborate and artistic; they can be painfully plain. They are built with an astounding array of materials—quarried coral, gypsum, stone slabs, boulders, imported marble, mud, wood and, in the oases, even palm fronds. Almost without exception, they have at least one dome and at least one minaret. But the sky is the limit, depending on the wealth of a community or its benefactors. Unless a mosque is a gift from the government or from a loaded sheikh with excess dirhams or rials, often the case in the oil-wealthy Gulf, it’s usually funded and maintained by the locals. But from the Gulf to Casablanca, from Amman to Surabaya, wherever there are Muslims a mosque is never far away.

The Grand Mosque in Muscat, the thoroughly enchanting capital of Oman, is mind-bending. It is no exaggeration to hail it as one of the finest constructions you are ever likely to see. In the author’s experienced but architecturally challenged view, it is up there with the Taj Mahal in India and the Duomo in Florence. There’s a lot of it and probably justice cannot be done to it in less than a day.

It was built at the spare-no-expense behest of Sultan Qaboos bin-Said, the Supreme Ruler of Oman who came to power thirty years ago after overthrowing his father in a bloodless palace coup. Qaboos still holds ultimate power in Oman, but if emerging Omani Muslim democrats have their way, Muscat’s new and incredibly beautiful mosque—Qaboos’ monument to himself—could turn out to be all he is remembered for. But the new mosque could also become a home for the ‘new Islam’.

The mosque still under construction outside Abu Dhabi is colossal, multi-domed and many-minaretted. Completed, it will be the biggest in the world. By the starkest of contrasts, the ‘traveller’s rest’ mosque my friend Hassan prayed at off the highway between Abu Dhabi and Dubai was attached to a service station. Just how serviceable can the Muslim faith get? ‘Leave the car with me, sir. I’ll fill her up and check your oil and water, while you grab a quick prayer.’ Islam is truly as much a way of life as it is a religion. In between these extremes is Saeed Marijibe’s (we will meet him in Part Five) friendly little community mosque, built by his family for their quiet Omani neighbourhood in middle-class suburban Muscat.

In Dubai there’s a very special mosque, one that reaches out to non-Muslims. Abdallah al Serkel, the brain behind Dubai’s Open Mosque, is a veritable font of information about his religion and its culture—two things he says are inseparable. We had a number of absorbing conversations during the author’s time in the UAE, including one at the mosque as he was attempting to demystify Islam for a bunch of wide-eyed expats and Western tourists.

The mosque is an easy stroll from the Open Beach, a strip of Gulf coast popular with expats, Muslim travellers, Western holiday-makers, and non-Muslim Arabs from the region. The dichotomy of Dubai was evident during several walks the author took at the Open Beach: the elegant minarets of the mosque’s towers in the background, bikini-clad sunbathers in the foreground. If the mosque’s ambitious Open Doors, Open Minds project takes off, it could well become the portal to the Islam of the future—a far less closed and religiously exclusive Islam.

Abdallah emphasised that he was not a Muslim scholar or anything like that, but a volunteer worker at the mosque. He’s also a highly successful businessman. Our chat turned into what I think of as Abdallah’s Crash Course in Islam. Read, learn and enjoy!

image 5

ABDALLAH AL SERKEL: The Brain Behind Dubai’s Open Mosque

George Negus: What does this loaded word ‘Islam’ actually mean?

Abdallah: Let me start with how the people from this part of the world think and where that thinking comes from. Islam is a word, in Arabic, which means ‘surrender.’ If you are a Muslim, you have surrendered, handed over your way of life. You have complied with the ‘do’s and the don’ts’ in God’s teachings.

GN: Belief in God is the basis of it all, isn’t it?

A: Islam also means oneness, believing in one God, the oneness of God, the one and only beloved God. In general, whoever believes in the oneness of God—you can call him Allah, God, by whatever name you like—you are a Muslim. Muslims believe that what will save you on Judgement Day is believing in the one and only Creator.

GN: The Five Pillars of Islam—what would you call them?

A: Let’s start with the shahadah, the declaration of faith. When in a person’s heart they reach the conclusion that there is one Creator, that’s the first step. You don’t have to stand in the main square in the city of Dubai or Abu Dhabi or anywhere else and shout in front of everyone: ‘I have reached this conclusion.’ That is not the way of Islam. Islam is something that comes to your heart and then you plan your life on it.

GN: And the Second Pillar?

A: The Second Pillar of Islam is prayer, salat. Muslims pray five times a day, starting before sunrise, the time we call dawn. About an hour and a half before the first signs of light appear on the horizon, that’s the dawn. That’s the time when, every day, people pray their first prayer. The second prayer is the noon prayer, which at this time of the year is around 12.15. You can pray this prayer anytime after that time. You have a period of about three hours until 3:30.

GN: So you don’t panic and go into a flat spin when you hear the Call to Prayer?

A: No. If you’re at work or if you have a business, many places have their own prayer rooms and you can just finish whatever you have to do. If you’re a doctor, you don’t drop your tools in your patient’s stomach and go to prayer!

You can wait until you’ve finished and then go to the prayer room. The 3.30 or 3.45 prayer depends on the time of the year. That’s the optimal prayer time and it has a limit also, until sunset, again a period of two-and-a-half to three hours. The sunset prayer is the fourth prayer. That has a limit of about thirty minutes, because that’s when it’s getting dark. We should pray while it’s half dark, half light. The last prayer is the night prayer and at this time of the year, that’s around 8.00 or 8.30. Anytime before dawn, you can pray the night prayer. You don’t have to rush once you hear the Call to Prayer. But you do get a reward if you walk to the mosque or if you pray on time.

GN: Given that Islamic society is tax-free, what’s the Third Pillar about? Is it a sort of tax substitute?

A: In a way. The Third Pillar, called zakat, is the purifying of your money. It’s something you have to do once a year, every year, at a set time. If twelve months have passed on the value of your property, your capital, your assets, then you’re required to take out 2¹/2 per cent of the total money that you own and pay it to people in need. There are eight categories specified that cover the needy side of the community, starting with your closest relatives, then your closest neighbours and so on.

GN: The Fourth Pillar—your annual fast? Most non-Muslims are really intrigued by that idea.

A: We’re talking here about the month of Ramadan when Muslims fast from dawn until sunset. We don’t drink or eat during that period. We don’t do ‘the husband and wife thing’ during the daytime. You would understand what I mean? Who should fast and who shouldn’t? Is it compulsory? Well, fasting is for those who are healthy and can normally fast between dawn and sunset.

GN: Any exceptions?

A: Women who are pregnant and women who are breastfeeding don’t have to fast. If you have some kind of illness, any kind of illness or surgery, you don’t have to fast. But you have to make it up later. With diabetes, for example, you don’t have to fast at all if it could seriously damage your health. If you’re travelling, you don’t have to fast, but again you have to make it up some other time. Because we follow the lunar calendar, Ramadan might come in the middle of summer when it’s very hot, so some Islamic scholars have said construction

Reviews for The World From Islam

[readinghabit_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I’m ashamed to say it, but other than a brief study of the Arab-Israeli conflict in High School, my knowledge of Islam is extremely limited. Like most of us, I rely entirely on the television and tabloid media to provide a frame of reference for this complex part of the world. And like all media, it’s difficult to separate the sensationalism from the actual facts. So when I came across a copy of this book I was keen to give it a go and find out what one of Australia’s most respected journalists, and one that I have great admiration for, had to say about the issue.The book is not a history of the Muslim world – actually it’s far from it. The tag line on the back cover reads – “Not everything, but a hell of a lot of what you always wanted to know about Muslims, but no one got around to telling you.” And that’s exactly what the book delivers. Negus presents his information through a series of colourful anecdotes that he has written over 25 years of travel and reporting from this region. Along the way we meet some interesting characters who make up Negus’ extended Islamic family and we share in the ups and downs of their lives.Somehow Negus manages to demystify many things that seem foreign to residents of the Western world – the burka, Ramadan, insh’allah (god willing) and the Qur’an (or Koran). And surprisingly, what becomes most clear in this book is that despite the obvious differences in religion and culture, the Muslim world also shares many similarities with the West. We are not as different as we may think!During one period of his travels throughout Islam, Negus was accompanied by his young son. It was Negus’ numerous accounts of his son’s reactions to some of the more terrifying and violent events that have occurred in the area that I found most interesting. Seeing these events through the eyes of an innocent child who is unaffected by political scare tactics really puts everything into a simplified perspective. We learn that Muslims are human - just like us - and that they want the same things out of life – a happy family and a safe home.The real beauty of this book is that Negus manages to provide a rational and balanced account of the Islamic world. In the September 11 aftermath, governments are hell-bent on instilling a fear of Muslims and terrorism amongst their constituents. It is refreshing to listen to a voice of reason. Negus declares with unabashed certainty that “more than 99.99% of Muslims are not, repeat not, terrorists”, and after reading this book I agree wholeheartedly. Negus has certainly managed to illuminate this young mind with his human insight.